Biography

Réjean Plamondon received a B.Sc. degree in Physics, and M.Sc.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Laval, Québec, P.Q., Canada in 1973, 1975 and 1978 respectively. In 1978, he joined the faculty of the École Polytechnique, Université de Montréal, Montréal, P.Q., Canada, where he is currently a Full Professor. He has been the Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1996 to 1998 and the President of Ecole Polytechnique from 1998 to 2002. He is now the Head of Laboratoire Scribens at this institution.

Over the last twenty-five years, Professor Plamondon has been involved in many pattern recognition projects, particularly in the field of on-line and off-line handwriting analysis and processing. He has proposed many original solutions, based on exhaustive studies of human movement generation and perception, to problems related to the design of automatic systems for signature verification and handwriting recognition, as well as interactive electronic pen-pads to help children learning handwriting and powerful methods for analyzing and interpreting neuromuscular signals. His main contribution has been the development of a kinematic theory of rapid human movements which can take into account, with the help of a unique basic equation called a delta-lognormal function, the major psychophysical phenomena reported in studies dealing with rapid movements. The theory has been found successful in describing the basic kinematic properties of velocity profiles as observed in finger, hand, arm, head and eye movements. Professor Plamondon has studied and analyzed these biosignals extensively in order to develop creative and powerful methods and systems in various domains of engineering. In the last ten years, he has also been deeply involved in the generalization of his kinematic theory to the study of emerging phenomena in physical systems with the goal of bridging the gap between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity.

Full member of the Canadian Association of Physicists, the Ordre des Ingénieurs du Québec, the Union national des écrivains du Québec, Dr Plamondon is an also active member of several international societies. He is a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS; 1989), of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR; 1994) and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE; 2000). From 1990 to 1997, he was the President of the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society and the Canadian representative on the board of Governors of IAPR. He has been the President of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS) from 1995 to 2007. He has been involved in the planning and organization of numerous international conferences and workshops and has worked with scientists from many countries. He is the author or co-author of more than 300 publications and owner of four patents. He has edited or co-edited four books and several Special Issues of scientific journals. He has also published a children book, a novel and three collections of poems.